The reporting of Susanne Craig of the New York Times and David Cay Johnston, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting when he was with that paper, and has recently published The Making of Donald Trump, combine to allow us to draw a critical insight about Trump and Goldman Sachs.
Trump is infamous for an infamously long list of glaring faults. For my purposes, I only have to discuss two of those faults. First, and requiring no citation, Trump is arrogant and vainglorious and chooses sycophants who prosper by feeding his vanity and narcissism. As a white-collar criminologist and former financial regulator when we successfully prosecuted hundreds of large real estate developers, I have dealt with scores of arrogant real estate developers.
Second, Trump is not very bright and he is lazy. He cannot be troubled to learn and he is so arrogant and surrounded by sycophants that he thinks he is a genius in everything, particularly the complicated things where his ignorance is the greatest and most dangerous.
Here is how David Cay Johnston described Trump in a recent interview.
A: I met Donald Trump within days of arriving in Atlantic City (where Trump owned several properties) to cover the casino industry in 1988, and in our very first encounter I sized him up as a P.T. Barnum. His competitors and even his own people started telling me Donald doesn’t know anything about the casino business — he doesn’t know the games, the odds, customer relations, he doesn’t know anything. In an interview with Donald, I asked questions that he tried to bull his way out of and I did something investigative reporters sometimes do — I deliberately said something that was false. Donald, like a television psychic, immediately incorporated my false statement into his answer and that told me this guy is essentially at heart a con artist who tells you what you want to hear.
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